Marissa Mayer

Business Personality / Computer Scientist

Born: 30 May 1975

Birthplace: Wausau, Wisconsin

Best known as:

The early Google employee who became CEO of Yahoo in 2012

Name at birth: Marissa Ann Mayer

Marisa Mayer was hired as Google employee #20 in 1999, which made it all the more surprising when she left the company to become CEO of search rival Yahoo in 2012. Marisa Mayer was born in Wisconsin and earned both a B.S. degree (in symbolic systems, 1997) and an M.S. degree (in computer science, 1999) at Stanford University. Later in 1999 she joined Google, then a fledgling search engine, as its first engineer. As Google grew from 20 to 20,000 employees, Mayer flourished at the highest levels of the company -- most notably managing search and championing the iconic super-simple Google search page. She became one of the world's more famous female computer engineers. At the same time she made a splash in San Francisco social circles, and her blonde good looks spawned many news stories about "geek chic" and "having it all." By 2012, Marissa Mayer was worth an estimated $300 million, but she also seemed to have gone as high as she could in Google's executive suite. That year she quit at Google to take over as CEO at Yahoo!, a longtime rival search engine. Her first day on the job at Yahoo! was July 17, 2012.

Extra credit:

Marissa Mayer married lawyer and investor Zachary Bogue on 12 December 2009. Their first child, a son, was born on September 30, 2012... Marissa Mayer is widely known for her society and cultural interests: She is on the board of San Francisco Ballet and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among other institutions... Her name is pronounced "MY-er," according to a 2009 article in Vogue... She dated Larry Page, one of the founders of Google, for a short time in the early 2000s... She has run the Portland Marathon and the San Francisco half-marathon, she told the New York Times in 2009.